


the only soul I've ever saved

by valkyrisms



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Dubious Science, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Jotunn Biology (Marvel), NOT in a sexy way!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-22
Updated: 2019-01-22
Packaged: 2019-10-13 20:46:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17495075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/valkyrisms/pseuds/valkyrisms
Summary: Heimdall uses the last of his strength to send the both the Hulk and Loki's body flying through space, but only Bruce Banner lands on Earth. After the defeat of Thanos, the reverse of the snap, and the beginnings of rebuilding, Thor thinks Loki's body lost among the stars.Six months later, he lands in Queens.





	the only soul I've ever saved

**Author's Note:**

> I feel like everyone has done a version of Peter and Loki becoming friends but here we are 
> 
> title is from delta rae's "chasing twisters"

It’s Ned who finds him. 

Peter’s phone rings as he’s riding the train across New York, and he almost doesn’t pick it up. It’s always hard to hear with the wind and Ned doesn’t panic if he doesn’t answer the phone like Aunt May does, so he debates it for a second before choking down the last of his hot dog and answering. 

“Hey, Ned, I’m on the train, like _on_ the train, can I call you back in like two seconds real—” he starts, but Ned cuts him off.

“Uh, yeah, you should probably get back here right now, actually,” Ned says, almost squeaks, and Peter immediately shoots off a web to the nearest fire escape, away from the wind to hear him better. “As fast as you can.”

“What’s going on? Are you okay? Aunt May, is she—” 

“We’re fine, but you really need to get back here. To my apartment, behind in that one alleyway with the family of raccoons. And _hurry_.” 

Ned calls him about petty crime all the time, about someone being a jerk to a storeowner or trying to steal a bike in the middle of the street, but this is the first time he’s sounded _panicked_ , scared as opposed to eager and excited to see his best friend in action. “I’m on my way,” Peter says, and sets off back towards Queens.

 

At first, Peter doesn’t see what the big deal is. He got back with Ned, who had been pacing back and forth across the alley for the last fifteen minutes until Peter got there, and then he’d been dragged in the direction of a dumpster. 

There’s two feet hanging over the side, bent knees on the edge of the dumpster, the rest of the body still in the trash. 

“Dude, did you call me because some drunk guy’s in the trash? You could just haul him out! Don’t need super strength—” Peter starts, but Ned cuts him off again.

“Peter, can you just look?” he says, and clambers on top of a plastic egg crate abandoned on the ground to look inside the dumpster. “Stick your head in here.” 

“Come on, I don’t want to stick my head in the dump—”

_“Peter.”_

Peter springs off the ground and lands lightly on the edge, holding his nose and peering into the dark. The guy, thankfully, isn’t covered with trash, so Peter doesn’t have to move anything to get a look at him. The first thing he registers are the clothes, a lot of leather and clasps so that he can’t actually see how the guy got the bodysuit looking thing on and off and the fact that it’s torn a little around the neck, which is how he notices the second thing. The dude’s throat is fucked up. 

“Holy shit, is he okay? I mean, is he alive?” Peter asks Ned, but reaches forward into the dump to look for a pulse, then scrambles because if he’s alive and Peter goes around pushing around his neck that probably won’t be good, so he reaches up to the guy’s face with his hand to see if he’s breathing, and that’s when he notices the third thing. Slowly, very slowly, Peter takes his hand out of the dumpster.

“He’s alive! I checked! But I don’t think we should be touching him a lot, considering he’s?” Ned doesn’t finish the sentence, instead just pitching his voice up and gesturing broadly towards the man in general. 

_Peter, I don’t think you should get any closer,_ Karen says. _Loki is classified as a highly dangerous individual and was SHIELD’s number one wanted before its collapse._

“Well, what am I supposed to do?” He reaches out to touch Loki’s face again, but squirms and pulls his hand back. This is Loki. This was the first supervillain the world had ever seen, the man so dangerous he made the Avengers, and he was _laying in a dumpster behind Ned’s apartment._

Ned coughs. “You can’t just leave him here. What if he wakes up and starts killing people? People like me, I live literally right there,” he says, pointing to his window. There’s a deflated Darth Vader balloon tied to the railing. 

“Mr. Thor says he got better about the evil thing before he died. Are we sure it’s him? What if it’s just some grifter from a party? What if we call the cops and it’s just a dude?” The guy who is probably Loki but maybe also isn’t doesn’t stir, even when Peter pokes him in the thigh. The leather there is thick, and the more Peter looks at it the more buckles and belts and clasps it looks like it has on it. It looks like Thor’s armor, which is a point for the _Loki_ column, but Peter also knows there are some weird parties that happen around this area and leather is part of them, so there’s a point in the _Not-Loki_ column also. 

_I have done the facial recognition scans from footage of the Chitauri invasion,_ Karen says. _This is Loki. I suggest you call Mr. Stark._

Yeah, Mr. Stark would know what to do. All Peter had to do was pick up the phone or tell Karen to call him. Karen didn’t have to give him footage from the suit or tell him what Peter was up to any more since the Training Wheels protocol had been removed for good, so unless Peter told someone Loki was about they just wouldn’t know. Mr. Stark had made a point to trust Peter’s judgement after Peter had done so much during Thanos’ invasion, since Peter had died.

“Karen, call—” And then he stopped. 

“Peter, what are you doing? He’s out now, but in like two seconds he’s going to spring up and curse us,” Ned hisses and pokes Loki with a broken branch. He doesn’t stir. Peter frowns and looks back down at him. He looks kind of sad just laying there in the trash, in a nest of fruit peels and soggy cardboard. And his neck is real broken. Peter knows he must be making some sort of expression because Ned goes, “No way. Don’t even think about it. This is an Avengers problem!” 

“I am an Avenger,” Peter says. “Now, hold his head.”

 

Ned gives Peter a solid veto on letting Loki stay at his apartment, which Peter kind of gets because it’s just him and Aunt May at his place, and Ned has two parents, a brother, a sister, a cat, and a grandmother staying there. Aside from the fact that all of them would be helpless if Loki came to life and tried to murder his way out, it’s just a little crowded. 

Aunt May’s been a bit sad lately, with Peter dying and everything, and he feels _terrible_ for bringing Loki into the house, but he doesn’t really have a choice. _Peter,_ Karen says, like she’s been saying for the past twenty minutes and Peter doesn’t have the heart to shut her off. _I really don’t think you should do this. I really suggest you call Mr. Stark._

“I can’t! Mr. Stark is really busy right now trying to rebuild the world and I can handle this. He’s with a bunch of cops anyway, like government cops, and I’m pretty sure they’d arrest Loki immediately,” he tells her, like he’s been telling her. 

“Yeah, man, I’m with Karen on this one,” Ned says in his other ear. “Loki’s been really evil! You literally just died. You can’t do that again.”

“Stop ganging up on me,” Peter whines. The suit is attached to his body so he can’t even escape without Ned just calling him over and over. 

He’s been doing the most careful swinging of his life through Queens and back to his apartment. He’s really happy and knows he’s lucky that his secret identity remained a secret and the apartment is still his safe space, and now he’s going against his luck by swinging Loki across the neighborhood like a sack of potatoes. Loki’s neck is bound up in as many webs as Peter could make without covering his mouth or nose, trying to prevent him from lolling all over the place and causing further damage. He had wrapped up Loki’s arms and legs so he didn’t look so dead swinging around because that was freaky, but instead now he looks like he met the spiders from the _Lord of the Rings_ and Peter feels like he’s taking him back to his lair to eat him. Ned had said as much too. But it was working, as far as Peter could tell. So what if a few people got photos of Spider-Man jumping from roof to roof, hauling a cocooned body up, and repeating the process? What was the point of dying saving the world if people didn’t trust you at least a little after?

Finally Peter huffs and pulls himself over the railing of the fire escape outside his room and begins the tedious process of dragging Loki’s body up by the webbing, finally hauling him over as well. Peter knows he’s strong, so Loki feeling heavier than the average man is a little off-putting. Although Thor’s unbelievably jacked, so maybe Loki is just hiding some muscle under all that leather. 

_Peter, I’m really thinking that Mr. Stark should handle this one. For safety,_ Karen tries one more time as Peter lays on the fire escape, exhausted, Loki’s cocooned body crushing his legs.

“I will, I promise. But I won’t until Thor gets back. This is his brother, and Thor thinks he’s dead, and if Loki gets locked up before Thor can even say hi to him I know it’ll be bad.” That’s the logic he’s sticking too, but it also feels a little wrong just to hand the guy over when he’s obviously seriously injured. 

And Thor. Thor’s in Asgardia, the new settlement for their people that floats a little ominously above Oklahoma for some reason, trying to rebuild his nation and with what remains of his people. He’s been a little MIA lately, exploring the stars, kicking it with the space raccoon Peter had only briefly met, and generally being the coolest dude in the cosmos, but the main point is that _he’s not here_ and Peter can’t send Loki away without Thor getting to see his brother again, he can’t. It’s not right. 

Loki’s definitely going to kill him in his sleep, but still. 

He wraps his arms around Loki’s torso and slides him backwards into the window of his room. It takes Peter a bit to unwrap the webs, because it turns out wrapping a whole person in webs several inches deep is harder to unravel than his backpack lightly webbed to a tree, but when he releases Loki he’s still breathing and his neck doesn’t look any worse, so he thinks he did okay. He deposits Loki into his bed, and once all the webs are gone he looks a little like a corpse again. Ned is keeping watch at his apartment to see if any shady government types show up in case Loki's body crashing in an alley set off some sensors, and Peter should be doing that kind of surveillance too, but instead he just hangs a _Do Not Disturb_ sign on his door for Aunt May and freaks out a little. The sign had come from a suggestion of a therapist after Thanos, cleared by Tony to discuss secret super power Avenger identity things, and Peter puts it up whenever he needs some time alone. He felt bad about it at first, like he was kicking Aunt May out of his life, but she got it immediately because she’s great like that. 

Peter feels like that sign is going to be up there a lot until this gets sorted.

He flutters around Loki for another few seconds before lifting up his arm and dropping it. It flops back on the bed. “Karen, can you do a full body scan? See if anything is broken?” 

_Several of his cervical vertebrae are broken. I am not capable of doing a CT scan, but I think his spinal cord is severely damaged as well. He has fractures along his clavicle and in several fingers._

That wasn’t anything new, but it wasn’t nice to hear it. “Is he going to be okay? I mean, I can’t fix his neck? Is it fixing himself like that time the Hulk dropped that huge boulder on Thor’s hand and it was fine the next day?”

_The fact that he is still breathing on his own and that I am picking up minor electrical signals in his extremities suggest that he is either healing himself very slowly or that the damage is not as dangerous to him as it would be to a human. But really, Peter, I don’t know._

Peter groans. “Okay, well, can you record his electrical signals and see if they’re… better? Later?” 

_I can do that, Peter. I will let the reconnaissance drone out in an hour._

“Okay, yeah, please. Thanks, Karen,” Peter says, and hits his chest to expand the suit. He tosses it over the side of his bed, pulls on some real pants, and clambers next to Loki on the bed, cross-legged. After a minute, he picks up Loki’s arms and clasps them over his stomach so they’re not just akimbo everywhere, but that just makes him look like a corpse even more. “Okay,” he says to himself. “This isn’t doing any good.” 

He uncrosses Loki’s arms to make him look like he’s not in his final rest, throws a blanket over him, panics some more, and then leaves him there to go out with Aunt May for lunch. 

 

Peter’s almost afraid of what he’s going to come back to, but Loki hasn’t moved one inch, still under the blanket. The little spider bot is whirring around the room, and Peter holds out a finger so it can land on him. “Hey, little guy,” he says, rubbing it on the underside of its metal belly, which he knows is dumb because it’s not real, but hey, if Mr. Stark can talk to his robots he can too. “How’d the scan go?” 

_It appears that his body is indeed healing itself, just at a very, very slow pace. From the information I’ve gathered, it appears as though he’s been healing for quite some time. I suspect he was pretty bad off at the time of the injury._

Thor wouldn’t tell anyone how Loki had died, just that Loki had died trying to save Thor, save the world, and Thanos had killed him. Wouldn’t say another word about it, and wouldn’t hear a bad word about Loki, not even a joke. Mr. Stark said that after the invasion, he was able to talk about Loki, put up with the gentle ribbing about him from the team and the less-gentle comments from Hawkeye, but now he got a real stonewalled look and all the life seemed to go out of him.

Peter kind of got the impression Thor was really depressed sometimes. Which is why he had to keep Loki safe! And Ned, and Aunt May, and anyone else who Loki might go bananas on. This was hard.

“Do you have any idea when he’ll be done? Or at least wake up?” 

_Once his spinal cord has repaired itself, I imagine he’ll regain control of his body. If you’re determined to keep this to yourself, you should be ready for when he wakes up. You probably have a few days._

A few days. He can do that. He tells Aunt May he’s not feeling so well and is going to be staying out of the suit for a few days, which is true, technically, but only because the trouble is already in his house. She’s relieved anyway, which makes him shift guiltily in his chair. It had taken a lot of convincing to let him back in the suit and on the street to begin with, because there was no way he was doing it if she really didn’t want him to, and he still feels like she’s sitting at home having anxiety attacks when he’s away sometimes. 

There’s no way to really prepare for Loki waking up, which works just as well considering it’s not a few days, it’s in about sixteen hours.

Peter had decided to leave Loki on the bed so he didn’t move around so much, and stacked his pillows and the ones from the hallway closet around him, so he wouldn’t loll in his sleep or unconsciousness or whatever. He then webbed some blankets to the ceiling and laid in them like a hammock to sleep himself, and when he wakes up the next morning Loki was awake.

“Holy shit,” he breathed, peering over the edge of the hammock. 

He wasn’t _conscious_ , Peter thought, but maybe just kind of in that state when you first wake up and you’re not sure if you’re late for class because you’re still kind of dreaming. His eyes were open but he hadn’t moved, narrow-eyed slits staring up at the top bunk and limbs still spread and uncoordinated.

“Mr. Loki,” Peter whispers. 

Slowly, Loki’s eyes move to the side. “Up here.” The eyes slide back and up a little bit, and Loki notices him. His eyes open a little bit more, still squinted and tired, but he blinks once, twice, and then his eyebrows furrow a little. “How are you feeling?” Peter whispers.

Loki doesn’t answer. He looks at the webbing Peter used to make his hammock, then the bunk again, then some of the odd junk Peter has laying about, then the posters, and then closes his eyes and goes back to sleep. 

“Holy _shit_ ,” he repeats, and scrambles for his phone.

 

Peter and Ned stand over Loki. Ned pokes him with a pencil. “Dude,” Peter says. “Don’t do that. He was awake earlier but he wasn’t really awake, you know? He was just looking.”

“Looking at you? Did he see you without your mask on?”

“Uh, yeah. Was that something I was supposed to be keeping secret? He’s living in my apartment and I have to take the suit off to live and stuff,” Peter says.

“I guess,” Ned grumbles, and sits on the bed. “Do you have any way to get in touch with Thor yet?” 

He doesn’t. There’s no way to really tell if Thor is around or even on Earth without asking Mr. Stark and that would _definitely_ set off some alarm bells. Mr. Stark was pretty savvy to when Peter was doing something dumb these days. This definitely counted as something dumb. “I’m just going to wait until someone mentions he’s around, and then I’ll go see him,” Peter tries, which he knows sounds stupid but unless has any other plan, it’s the one he’s doing. “I can’t go around asking all the Avengers where he is or they’ll know something’s up.”

“You talk about Thor all the time. It wouldn’t be weird. And I don’t think anyone would guess that you’re hiding a supervillain in your bedroom,” Ned sighs and pokes Loki again. He doesn’t stir. Peter doesn’t respond and instead makes a frustrated noise. Ned hums back in agreement. The three of them sit in silence for another few seconds before Ned sighs again and says, “Let’s watch _Star Wars_ or something. Just looking at him is giving me the heebie jeebies.”

Obi-Wan has just sacrificed himself when Loki makes a noise, almost a wheeze, from behind them. “And the best part, too,” Ned complains, but shuts off the TV and shuffles on his knees to peer over the bed. For all that he keeps talking about how Loki’s a supervillain, Peter is way more wary around him than Ned is. Won’t catch him dead looming over Loki like Ned is now. 

Now that the sun is out and his room is a little brighter, Peter can see that the marks around Loki’s neck aren’t so lurid and bright against the pale of his skin. They still look ugly as fuck, Peter can admit, but maybe a little less scary than before. Or maybe they’ve just healed that much. And his eyes are open again, the same tired slits rather than full awake eyes. His breath comes out of him in a low whistle, which Peter recognizes as the sound they heard, not so much a moan or a groan but a sandpapery kind of rattle that definitely gives Peter horrible visual imagery of breath coming up and down through a crushed trachea. “Ned, can you get me some water?” he whispers, not looking away from Loki’s face, and Ned nods jerkily and escapes to the kitchen. 

He’s back a minute later. Loki hasn’t moved. “Hey, sorry, I went through your aunt’s stuff. I know that’s creepy, but I didn’t find anything weird and—” He holds up a glass of water in one hand and one of Aunt May’s neck pillows in the other one.

“Oh, cool, yeah, give me that.” Peter knows absolutely nothing about first-aid, but he’s trying, okay? Mr. Stark put some first-aid courses into Karen and he sometimes checks them out if crime is slow. But that stuff was CPR and splints and bee stings, not _shattered neck of a man that should’ve killed him but he’s resting in my room_ and oh god, this whole thing was a terrible idea. He bends the little pillow around and under Loki’s neck, trying not to move him too much, and tucks it around the other side. 

He looks less corpse-ish and more like he’s chilling in a cozy first class airline now, so Peter takes it as a win. 

“Mr. Loki,” Peter whispers, moving a little closer to the side of the bed. He feels like he’s talking directly into Loki’s ear which is weird, but Loki doesn’t even respond. “Can you even make someone drink if they’re laying down? Won’t he choke?” Peter whispers, nudging Ned, who’s staring at Loki’s hands. “Ned,” he hisses when he doesn’t answer, and then sees what Ned’s seeing.

Loki’s hands are changing color. 

His four fingers down to the center of his palm are a vibrant sapphire color. His nails have turned completely black, and when Peter unthinkingly picks up his hand to look at it, he sees that the underside and tops of his nails are black, like they’ve grown in that way, and they appear to be rougher, not like human keratin. 

“Not to panic or anything, which I’m totally not doing, but, uh, didn’t Thor say something about Loki being adopted?” Ned squeaks, and takes Loki’s hand from Peter’s and puts it back down on the bed, patting it. “Do we have a _real space alien_ here?” he whispers, leaning forward, directly into Loki’s face, which ends up being the move that snaps Loki’s patience.

The rattling in Loki’s throat turns into something that sounds a lot like what the Rottweiler next door sounds like when someone gets too close, and Peter jerks himself and Ned back. “Sorry,” Peter breathes, and tugs Ned back even farther. “Can you drink water or will you die?” 

Loki’s eyes flicker in his direction and then to the water that’s precariously balanced on the footboard, and his tongue comes out to lick at his lips, which Peter takes as an affirmative. There’s red creeping in around the edges of Loki’s sclera, and his tongue is black. Cool cool cool. No problem. Peter thinks, _I have this. I’m an Avenger._

“Yeah, he’s a real alien, Ned. Thor is too. And so is the rest of his new crew except for Peter, who is still kind of an alien, maybe,” he says, slowly reaching for the water cup and letting Loki keep an eye on his every move. He doesn't even twitch at the mention of Thor.

“The _other_ Peter. The other, less cool Peter,” Ned says smugly.

“Damn straight,” Peter mumbles. Guy held a space gun to his temple. Talked smack about Thor. Still some hard feelings. 

He brings the water cup to Loki’s mouth, and tips it slowly so a trickle of water escapes. He readies himself for a choking fit, but Loki actually just reaches up, what the fuck, and takes the drink from him to finish it off himself. He seems to examine his hand, now fully blue and with some kind of etchings, and some emotion Peter can’t immediately discern crosses his face, but all he does is let out a little broken huff. He places the cup on the bed next to him and then promptly goes back to sleep.

“Well,” Ned says after a beat. “He didn’t kill you. That’s good.”

“I don’t think he even thinks I’m a threat,” Peter says gloomily. “Should’ve put the suit on.” 

“You’re not a threat,” Ned scoffs, which, _thanks_ , but he’s right. There’s no way Peter is going to hurt a dude who can’t move his neck, and even if he is a dirty faker who can move the rest of his body he’s still probably in a delicate state. He’s going to be the best host ever, at least until he can get a hold of Thor and make his life by telling him Loki’s alive ( _again_ ; maybe Peter should ease him into it a little) and they can have a touching reunion. How he’s going to get a hold of Thor without alerting the other Avengers is a different story. 

Loki still hasn’t stopped changing into whatever flavor of alien he really is underneath even though he’s passed out. The blue has crept up to his face now, and Peter would bet that underneath the leathers he’s still wearing he’s blue there too. The etchings on his hands have spread to his face also, little raised lines that look a little like face paint. There’s some kind of twin swelling happening on his forehead, which Peter pokes. The skin is _hard_ , and he yanks his hand back. His mouth is parted a little as he sleeps, and Peter takes the eraser end of a pencil from his desk and pries his mouth open a little. This all feels a little invasive, but Mr. Stark is always going on about experimentation and accurate scientific study so Peter supposes it’s alright. The fact that Loki has a mouth full of really sharp, jagged teeth is a fact Peter feels safer knowing. 

“Oh man,” Ned says. “He’s like a shark.”

“We are so unequipped for this,” Peter whispers. 

 

The primary objective becomes get a hold of Thor. At first, Peter was looking for a good reunion, but now that Loki’s been with Peter a few days the priority has turned into get a hold of Thor because Loki doesn’t seem to be getting any better. He can move his limbs around, to an extent— Peter hasn’t seen him move his legs, not even a twitch— and seems to come in and out of general awareness, but he’s not talking, and his neck has settled on being an ugly black color, swollen and distended. His skin is far, far hotter than it should be, or at least what Peter thinks it should be. Karen says his healing has stalled, and his condition is getting worse, not better. It seems like whatever has been healing Loki, his internal magic or just an accelerated healing factor, is now just devoted to keeping him alive. 

Peter thinks it has something to do with the alien part of Loki. Ever since he’s made his full magical girl transformation, his condition’s been plummeting and even though his temperature reads only reads slightly feverish, he’s burning up and spends a lot of his time shivering and looking ghastly. 

Karen tells Peter every hour if there’s any news about Thor, any word that he’s back from space. The second he’s back in Asgardia, Peter is swinging his ass to Oklahoma and dragging him back here. There’s a chance that Thor knows more about Loki’s condition than he does, or has some kind of healing god powers, or brought some space doctors with him, or knows some other aliens who can help, because Peter dragged this guy out of a dumpster and there’s no way he’s just going to let him die like that, wheezing and alone. 

Not totally alone, of course, Peter spends a lot of time with him, just absentmindedly talking to him or playing video games and narrating what he’s doing, spending a lot of that time feeling useless. 

It isn’t until Peter wakes up one morning to find Loki’s arm cast out to the side, unconscious, with a knocked over glass of water on the nightstand, like he had tried to reach for it and failed, which is really sad, that Peter stops waiting around for Thor. The spilled water is frozen, a small puddle on his nightstand and thin little icicles hanging from it, mid-drip to the floor.

He pulls his mask over his face. “Karen?” he calls out softly, not wanting to wake Loki up. 

_Yes, Peter?_

“Can you pull up everything you’ve got on Norse mythology?”

Peter’s eyes flood with the electronic blue of files and files of research, everything carefully organized under stupid names, Mr. Stark’s personal folder on everything Norse-related since Thor had hit the ground in New Mexico. Peter lays back in his hammock and begins to read.

 

He starts with moving Loki to his bathtub. Guess he’ll be taking secret showers at the school gym from now on and hitting up the lobby bathroom. Moving Loki takes both him and Ned and about five dozen more webs to keep his neck from snapping again, but Loki doesn’t wake up once during the entire thing which just solidifies that the guy needs major help. Trying to cram Loki’s long legs into the bathtub is a struggle and a half because they obviously grow them like weeds in space, but eventually Loki is pretzeled up, legs bent, arms tucked, neck wrapped in Aunt May’s pillow, and fairly secure. 

“Can I ask why the change of venue?” Ned asks.

“Don’t want my bed soaked, and we can drain the tub,” Peter replies, and drags the bags of ice out from the fire escape. 

It’s obvious Ned doesn’t really get what’s going on, but he’s the best of friends and just sighs, grabbing a bag and tearing it open. Loki takes up so much space in the tub that it’s hard to fill it up as much as Peter wants, so Peter just takes a chance and dumps the last bag over Loki’s head entirely, making sure cubes are around his neck and covering the swelling. 

Peter spends the majority of the day in the bathroom in case Loki wakes up and thinks Peter’s put him in an icy tomb, but when he does wake up all he does is raise a hand from the ice and feel around the edge of the tub. Peter takes the little dinosaur grabber he got at Walmart and picks up a few pieces of ice away from Loki’s face. Two bright red eyes stare balefully back at him. That’s not a glowing endorsement of his home remedies, but it’s not like Loki is strong enough to attack him. Peter creeps forward, staying a good foot away from Loki’s face and therefore Loki’s teeth, and perches on the edge of the tub. “Mr. Loki,” Peter whispers. “Are you a Jötunn?”

Even with the ice that still covers the majority of his lower face, Peter can see his mouth twist up in a snarl. “No, it’s cool, you’re just not fixing yourself and I thought bringing you back to alien homeostasis would be a good idea. So your environment is in peak healing conditions.” Loki’s face doesn’t change; if anything, Peter thinks he can start seeing those razor teeth peeking out from behind his lips. 

Peter still doesn’t move. There had been some footnotes Mr. Stark had highlighted, scrawled over and over again in the margins of actual publications on myth, that Loki had tried to kill all the Jötnar. The entire race, almost all obliterated with some kind of rainbow bridge he had charged into a super weapon. Thor had stopped him, of course, but the intent had been there. Those little notes had bothered Peter more than the memories of the alien invasion had; there hadn’t been any other reason for Loki to try and wipe them out aside from hatred. At least when Loki had invaded Earth there had been a goal that benefitted him and would place him as supreme leader of Earth or something (and even then, the notes Peter was looking at dated to years before Thanos even registered as a threat on the Avengers’ radar and Mr. Stark still had theories scribbled in the margins that Loki was working for _someone_ , that there was a bigger plan than cartoonish world domination, why wouldn’t anyone listen to him, who was behind that huge ship in the endless expanse of space?) but Loki’s large scale destruction of Jötunheim spoke of something deep-seated and ugly that Peter couldn’t fathom.

Peter dumps some more ice on his legs. Loki hisses at him.

“I’m helping you, dude. Or I’m trying to.” Peter picks up Step Two, which is a bunch of sashimi from the Asian market down the street. “So Jötunheim is like ninety percent ice, right? You guys probably fish a lot. You should probably eat this.” Loki hasn’t eaten anything since he rolled through the door, and Peter’s tried to give him tater tots and pizza and other delicious things that he should want to eat but the most he’s managed to do is look nauseated. 

Now, Peter can see him perking up, almost scenting the fish. Peter doesn’t really want to feed him it and he’s still pretty convinced Loki will take those Jötunn chompers and bite off his fingers, so he just puts the plastic box of sashimi on the rim of the tub, scooting it a little closer. 

Loki makes a big show of turning his nose up at it, making some huffy noises, picking at it like he’s disgusted, before finally eating the whole platter in about three bites. What a drama queen. Peter’s got two more boxes in the room, and Loki eats those as well before falling into a food coma. 

_I’m so good at this_ , he texts Ned. _I am the alien whisperer._

He’s not so good at it that Loki’s condition improves overnight, but he does look a little healthier come the following morning. Steps Three, Four, and Five are a little less alien science: now that the fish went well he brings in some pretty rare steak and makes Loki eat that, he pokes Loki’s legs and hips and face and asks if he can feel that (he can, and Peter heaves out a huge sigh of relief and thinks Loki huffs out a breath as well), and then brings Ned’s cat over for Loki to look at, because cats make everything better. Peter didn’t know if cats were a thing on Asgard, so he introduced Loki to her, and they seemed mutually disinterested in each other. Peter leaves her in the bathroom and comes back twenty minutes later to find Loki holding an ice cube while she licks it, looking the most content Peter’s ever seen him. Cats judge everyone equally. They’re the best.

Then Loki does get better. Peter thinks it’s probably all the ice and getting him back onto a regular eating schedule, but he pops in with his mask on one day to check on Loki and Karen informs him Loki’s vocal cords and trachea have mostly recovered, and he should be able to talk. Peter wants to launch into a thousand questions, about Asgard, about Thanos, about how he’s alive, about how to contact Thor, but Loki doesn’t give any indication that he can talk and just keeps feeding ice chips to Ned’s cat, careful not to touch her. 

Loki’s made no indication to Peter since he crashed that he’s been grateful for the help, shown any interest in the outside world, or asked about Thor, which is a little bit of a bummer because from what Peter can tell from Mr. Stark’s notes that he sometimes hacks into and sees, Thor has been struggling in Asgardia without his brother. 

Peter thinks Loki might be a little depressed, too. 

But that’s not a problem. The world is destroyed and mangled after Thanos, after six months of people wandering around without their other halves, their families, children, bosses, employees. Pets, even. The entirety of humanity is depressed. In a weird way, it’s the people who died in Thanos’ snap that ended up fairing the best. Peter remembers a world of orange, like a sunset, and the eerie feeling of walking without ever getting anywhere, and then Mr. Stark’s face pulling him back into the light, going, _hey, kid, don’t scare me like that again, got it?_

He wasn’t there when the Avengers had to reclaim the world. He just got to come home to it: Aunt May collapsing in the doorway of the apartment at the sight of him, Ned hugging him so tight he couldn’t breathe, and even MJ putting her hands on his shoulders, then his wrists, then his face, like she wanted to make sure he wasn’t a hallucination. 

“Mr. Loki,” Peter starts. “So, Thanos killed both of us. Do you want to talk about it?” 

He read online that creating shared experiences for survivors was very important. He didn’t really expect Loki to talk a whole lot about it, or care a lot about Peter’s ordeal, so it’s a little surprising that Loki’s eyes snap to him so suddenly, for the first time with intent.

“You’re a child,” Loki says. 

“You’re English!” Peter exclaims, and then cuts off his train of thought when Loki narrows his eyes. The fact that Loki is talking is good, great even, though his voice does sound like his vocal cords have been through a lawnmower. “Sorry, I mean, Thor has kind of a cool accent too. I shouldn’t be surprised. Anyway,” he fumbles for a moment, “I’m not a kid, I’m a man. I’m graduating high school soon. I’m an Avenger.”

So what if he puffs up a little while he says it? He earned it. It reminds Peter, though, that the Avengers were a group called together to stop the alien in his tub, and that kills his enthusiasm a little. Sure enough, Loki raises one eyebrow. “I wasn’t aware they had devolved to recruiting children in my absence. The threats to Earth must be less than substantial these days.” 

“Uh, I fought against Thanos. Head to head. And I can shoot webs and climb on walls. A child wouldn’t do that.” Getting shit from Loki wasn’t on the top of his list, _especially_ about the age thing, which he got enough of from Steve. Captain America had a lot of concerned opinions about Peter being part of the Avengers, but he had asthma at Peter's age and couldn't bench buses, so he could go stuff a sock in it. 

Loki’s face goes grave. “The threat has… passed, then?” he asks, as if Thanos was a ship in the night.

“He’s super dead, dude,” Peter says. “This badass blue cyborg girl stabbed him in the head.” He wasn’t there to see it, but goddamn did she sound cool. Her and Mr. Stark were kind of friends in the way that two people left alone on an alien planet after a universal genocide, giving each other repairs on his suit and her actual body with the ashes of their dead teams around them were friends, so Peter was still holding out hope for an introduction. 

Loki fixes his gaze to the shower tap in front of him, the grave look on his face fading into something like shock, maybe a little awe. “I see,” is all he says. 

It finally, _finally_ occurs to Peter what the problem is, and he scoots forward toward the tub from where he’s sitting on the floor. 

“Thor is alive, you know?” he says.

Loki turns his head robotically to look at Peter. His eyes are very red. “He’s not,” Loki says after a moment. “Thanos killed all of us before we got to Earth. Except me, it seems.” 

“No, he’s really alive. He crashed into a bunch of space pirates and he got a new eye and fought against Thanos and is building a new city for all the refugees, because a lot of them got out,” Peter says in one breath. 

Thor hadn't gone into detail about what happened on the ship, but he had said that Thanos had killed a lot of his people, killed his brother. By the time Thor had gotten all the story across, Thanos was already dead and the wounds were not healed, but not fresh either. For Loki, this attack had to have been a week ago. Peter knows that a week after Thanos had been defeated, he certainly wasn’t at peak mental health and the image of everyone on Titan crumbling into pieces, watching his own hands and legs crumble into pieces, Mr. Stark’s grasping hands and terror-stricken face, had stayed on repeat in his head for months. 

Peter would bet that the image repeating in Loki’s head was the similar to the one in Thor’s: bodies and bodies of Asgardians, Thanos’ hands on his brother.

Peter grabs his phone and searches _latest thor news_ , and immediately a photo turns up of Thor wandering a grocery store in Midgardian clothes, accompanied by an Asgardian woman with darker skin, face paint, and a decidedly un-Midgardian sword glowering directly into the camera. The next photo is of Thor giving the camera a thumbs up. He’s not smiling. The photo is dated before Loki’s appearance, but it’s only from a few weeks ago.

He turns the phone to Loki. “This was taken about two weeks ago. The war against Thanos ended six months ago. Thor’s in space right now, which is why I haven’t told him and why you’re crashing at my apartment. But he’s _definitely_ still alive.”

Loki’s mouth is a little parted as he reaches to take the phone from Peter but hesitates, clawed fingers and face spasming. “I can’t touch you— can you— on the edge?” Loki says, for the first time sounding anything other than haughty. 

Peter puts the phone on the rim of the tub and Loki picks it up gingerly, swiping back and forth between the two images. He doesn’t say anything for a minute, then places the phone back, saying only, “I see the Valkyrie survived as well.”

Peter’s not really sure who that is or why Loki knows her, but he sounds a little relieved so Peter supposes it’s a good thing. He doesn’t say anything about Thor, though, just resumes staring at that spot by the tap. Peter isn’t sure what to really say after that, so he just takes the phone back and clambers to his feet. 

“You can touch me, you know?” Peter says after a moment. Loki’s gaze moves from the tap to the floor in front of Peter, still not quite looking at him. “I don’t really know what your deal is with all that—” he gestures to Loki’s whole body, “—but you can touch me. I dragged you in here. I touched your hands and your neck and stuff. Not in a weird way! But you don’t have to worry about… whatever you’re worried about.”

Loki is looking at him in the face at the end of it. His face is perfectly expressionless. “Good to know,” he says finally, and sinks beneath the ice.

 

Peter starts to feel a little out of his element when it seems that Loki is perfectly content to lay in his bathtub and be depressed, and Aunt May has started asking about all the empty plastic ice bags. So he does what he always does: call Ned.

“There is no way in hell I’m talking to Loki! Are you crazy? If he goes nuts on me, it’s not like I can spider away like you,” Ned yells over the phone.

Peter’s crouched on the roof of his apartment building, away from both Aunt May’s and Loki’s prying ears. “He’s fine, Ned. He’s just bummed and I think he feels weird because I’m an Avenger. I don’t want him to feel like I’ve locked him in the bathroom, like a prisoner.”

“So, what is this? Not-prisoner visitation rights?”

“It’s— I’m trying to get him to understand that I’m a normal person with friends and stuff. All he does is stare at the wall. Karen says his bones are mostly better so I know he’s just sad. I feel bad that he’s just laying there for days on end.”

“Does he use the bathroom?”

“God, Ned, yes, but that’s not the point— Can you just come over and we can be normal so he talks to me and isn’t a zombie?” Peter pitches his voice to sound more pitiful. “Come on, man. Think how happy Thor will be.”

Ned sighs on the other end of the phone. “Yeah, I know. For Thor. I’ll be right over.”

Peter spends some time making his room look presentable so Loki won’t make fun of him, then stick his head in the bathroom. Loki, with his freshly healed body, has bent himself up to submerge his entire body in the ice. He picks up the dinosaur grabber he’s kept there and pokes the surface of the ice with it. “Hey, Mr. Loki. I’ve got a friend coming over and he’ll probably need to use the bathroom at some point. Can you move to my bed again? I can help you up,” he whispers, instinctively crouching down to Loki’s level. 

One of Loki’s hands emerges from the ice and makes a distinct “go away” motion. 

Peter trudges back to the room. He kind of wants there to be some kind of three way conversation here, with Ned there as a civilian so Loki doesn’t think this is like, an Avenger-on-villain interrogation, even though it probably should kind of be. Peter’s been trying to keep in his mind that even though Thor is messed up about Loki to the nth degree, the guy did has made some villainous attempts on two different civilizations and was on SHIELD’s watchlist for a reason. But he’s also weird and blue and has a bizarre accent, British-but-not-really, and Peter’s now lives on a planet of people with PTSD and other slews of mental health issues and he can recognize something is fundamentally _off_ in him. 

Peter has a few seconds where he hears the front door unlock, Ned using the spare key, to kick some boxes of sashimi off the bed so the place doesn’t so obviously look like taking care of Loki has dominated his life. “So,” Ned says, opening the door to Peter’s room. “What’s the plan here?” 

“We’re just going to be normal. And show Loki that we’re normal. And maybe that’ll get him to open up,” Peter says confidently, not at all like he feels.

Ned looks equally unimpressed. “So, what, showing Loki we’re kids is going to get him to open up?” 

“I’m hoping it’ll at least get him to stop seeing me as an enemy, yeah. I mean, we're not kids. I'm an Avenger.”

Ned ignores him, choosing rather to flop down onto the bed before turning to stare at Peter. “Your pillows smell like fish, Peter,” he says.

Peter runs his hands through his hair. “Karen and I hypothesized that if we got alien Loki back to his alien environment, his magic could focus more on healing himself than trying to adapt to a different planet. Things do better in homeostasis. He packs away anything fishy. Hey, don’t give me that look. It worked. He’s back to a good condition.”

Ned picks up one of the empty bags of ice off the floor. “Is he still, y’know… blue?”

Loki exits the bathroom at that moment, stretching his arms above his head in one fluid motion that makes Peter a little jealous. His bones pop in several different places, and with a few quick hand motions the wet and dirty leather cape and outerwear he’s in tumbles to the floor and he steps out of it, leaving him still in the leather pants but with some sleeveless under-armor underneath it. For the first time, Peter can see all of him in the light. 

Loki looks, well, like an alien, which Peter supposes he should’ve seen coming. His skin has faded into a little lighter blue now that he’s in the sun, which is interesting, the scientist part of Peter’s brain automatically cataloguing it as some kind of camouflage, and he’s got the darker blue etchings swirling around his face and his hands, trailing into his tiny sleeves and collar. His eyes are red and his pupils look more like a cat’s than a human’s, which should make him look pretty evil but Peter thinks it’s kind of neat. He’s got two little horns coming out from the sides of his forehead, which Peter thinks should probably be bigger and more threatening. They look kind of nubby right now. If Peter was going to hypothesize about something, it would be that in a while, those horns would get a hell of a lot bigger, which meant maybe Loki wasn’t fully grown? He certainly looks big and adult-ish, and he’s supposed to be around Thor’s age, and Thor is certainly a man. Or maybe he was just small for a Jötunn. Who knew? Aliens! An alien, right there by his bed looking pissed. It occurs to Peter that he’s staring, and looks away. 

Ned doesn’t do the same. “Hey, dude, why are you blue?” he asks flat out and Peter drags his hands down his face behind Loki where he can’t see. “And why do you only eat fish now?” 

Loki, thankfully, doesn’t smite him on the spot. The only reaction he has is to narrow his eyes into slits. Peter slinks around him to sit next to Ned and hopefully prevent him from asking any more stupid questions, and he sees that as Loki tilts his head to the light, his pupils grow. Unbelievably cool. Peter’s jealous as hell. He got special eyes after the spider bite, but they just gave him crazy nearsightedness and he had to ask to switch to the front row in all his classes before Mr. Stark helped some contacts and the lenses in the suit. “I do not know much about the Jötnar. Information on Asgard was not easily accessible, and admittedly I had no interest in seeking it out until it was too late. From what I understand, the Jötnar have adapted to hunt underwater. Fish, mostly, but probably other native species I don’t know about.” Peter gives himself a little internal high five. Got it in one about the fish. 

“Can you echolocate?” Ned asks almost immediately.

Loki blinks at him, and for the first time since Peter’s met him he seems to be at a loss for words. “No,” he replies finally. “Sorry to disappoint.” Peter doesn’t point that that during one of the scans, Karen had said Loki’s vocal cords were built differently than an Asgardian’s or a human’s, so maybe echolocation isn’t so far off.

Ned, undeterred, says, “Do you have blubber? To keep you warm? Like seals! Jötunheim is really cold, so—”

“ _That’s_ why you were so heavy! You have a layer of body fat!” Peter blurts out before he can think better of it.

Loki doesn’t respond. His mouth is slightly open, and he’s looking from Peter to Ned with a slightly squinty-eyed expression. “Dude,” Ned hisses, nudging him, “you can’t call him fat. He’ll totally kill you.”

“I won’t,” Loki says, seemingly automatically because he instantly looks annoyed at himself, before shaking his head and opening his mouth to talk.

“I mean, you’re not fat. Even if you were, there wouldn’t be anything wrong with that. You probably just have a _layer_ of fat, which sounds really useful in some situations like I fell in this really cold lake once—”

Peter stops talking when Loki leans his head forward and covers the lower half of his face with his mouth, stark black nails standing out against the pale blue of his skin, and Peter readies himself for some kind of attack, maybe a headbutt with those little horns. Then it registers, in the subvocal spider sense way, that the sound he’s hearing from Loki is _laughter_ , suppressed and clamped down before it ever leaves his throat but definitely there. He doesn’t think Ned hears it at all, with his human sense of hearing and to the outside it looks as if Loki is just done with their nonsense, but Peter, joyously, knows better. The moment is over in about two seconds, and Loki lifts his head again, expression blank. “Seals. That is possible, but without further examination, which is not happening, I can’t really say,” is all he says, voice devoid of expression, but Ned gives a sharp little nod and looks satisfied with himself. 

Ned sits Loki down to watch _Star Wars_. Peter thinks they probably should be spending more time talking and making friends, but Loki seems perfectly content to watch the movie and make passive-aggressive comments about it, to which Ned blows up in outrage. But the problem is fixed. Loki isn’t eyeing him so warily, especially not after he shows Loki how the spider suit works. And maybe that’s not such a great idea! Showing maybe-ex-villains Stark secrets. But Peter hasn’t really let Loki know that he and Mr. Stark specifically are in this together, and he seems far more interested in Karen than the actual crimefighting properties of the suit anyway.

“Who are you?” Loki asks directly into the opening of the hood. He looks ridiculous. Ned snaps a photo. Peter hopes that Mr. Stark doesn’t let the FBI snoop on people through the StarkPhones, or else they’re screwed, but Mr. Stark probably told them to stuff it anyway. 

_Hello, Loki. My name is Karen. I heavily advised Peter against this._

“That was wise of you,” Loki murmurs, and feels around inside the hood, presumably for some kind of transmitter. “This is no trick? You have a talking machine inside this costume?”

“I mean, I guess? I don’t really think of her as a machine. She’s my friend who helps me on missions and gives me advice and sometimes calls in other Avengers,” Peter replies, scratching his head. It’s hard to think of any of Mr. Stark’s bots as strictly machines, especially now that JARVIS is just out there as a part of Vision, walking around and wining and dining the Scarlet Witch. Mr. Stark misses his butler sometimes. Those weren’t emotions for a _machine_. “You guys don’t have anything like AI on Asgard?” 

Loki gives a little huff of a laugh. “I can’t imagine Odin taking any sort of advice, much less building something to give it to him.” The words are bitter, but Peter senses something deeper under them. For a second, he thinks it's the spider sense again, but then Ned shuffles closer to him and takes the hood from him.

“Put it on. She’s cooler in surround sound.”

“I will definitely not.”

“Fine,” Ned says, and pulls it on himself. “Look, I can make the eyes big!” The hunched look and bitter feeling fades from Loki’s face, and his mouth turns up in a smirk as Ned shouts into the mask. Peter’s heart swells. Ned is just the best, okay. Loki pulls one knee up and pillows his head on it, the most relaxed pose Peter’s ever seen even if he still moves his neck gingerly, and watches Ned make the eyes crazy in the mask, smiling all the while. 

 

Once Ned leaves, taking his cat with him, and Aunt May is out and about, working or shopping or working even more, Peter lets Loki out of the room for the first time. Now that he’s healed enough to use some magic, Peter flips the _Do Not Disturb_ sign so Aunt May doesn’t spend any more time being sad and worrying outside and can come in. Loki can turn himself into a stuffed animal or something. 

Loki spends some time peering around the kitchen, browsing through the magazines Aunt May has laying out, copying some of the clothes in them, and generally being judgmental. He had managed to drag together some semblance of his human skin, although there were still little alien signs showing through: the black of his nails and tongue, the unnatural pallor, and the way his eyes shifted back and forth between red and green like demented Christmas lights. He had spoken to Ned very briefly about it, that his magic was focusing more on the final stages of healing than keeping up his usual appearance. 

Peter whips up some eggs for the both of them after Loki spends a few minutes staring blankly at the stove and tosses them on a plate. Loki seems to be familiar with eggs, at least, and spends a few more minutes rummaging around Peter’s kitchen before finding some bread and making the eggs into a sandwich. Peter watches him eat, fastidiously picking at the crust, then the egg bits hanging off the side until he has a perfect square, and only then eating it like a regular person. 

Peter comes to the conclusion that Loki is fun. He’s weird. Peter likes picking apart the stuff that’s _Asgardian foreigner_ and _Jötunn_ and _Loki_. The unfamiliarity with the stove is Asgardian. The way Loki’s eyes go cat-like and red when he smelled the eggs is Jötunn. The bitchy, picky way he eats is all Loki. 

Loki's still tired, still obviously depressed, but he does seem a little better. His body language is more open to Peter, he's talking, and that's all Peter can really ask for, that Loki is willing to talk to him like a person and not avoid him like an Avenger. It's ironic that he's been spending the time with Loki insisting that he's an Avenger and it turns out just being himself is what Loki responds to. He wasn't expecting a conversation about _Star Wars_ to fix all his problems, but rather just get him over the edge of _life is over_. It’s obvious Loki still doesn’t really understand Peter chattering away at him, but Peter is pretty used to the blank, bored stares he gets from MJ whenever he and Ned start talking so it doesn’t bother him too much. He does the dishes with magic, which is very very cool and neat and he wants to keep Loki there to do his chores forever.

Peter’s trying to get advice on his love life from him (“You’d be better off asking Thor about this,” Loki says, and when Peter replies, “Uh, no. Remember, he got dumped,” Loki, remembering, looks smugly gleeful for a moment) when there is the distinct sound of someone banging around on the fire escape. “It’s probably just the neighbors,” Peter says at Loki’s subtle shift into battle mode, shoulders back, ramrod straight, eyes locked onto the door to Peter’s bedroom. “I’ll go check.”

Peter gets up from the couch and bounds to his door. Loki suddenly stands, stumbling forward over the table and having to dodge the recliner, calling, “Wait, Peter—” but he’s already opened the door.

Mr. Stark is in the middle of his room, holding up several of the balled up empty bags of ice Peter’s been storing on the fire escape. He’s only got his boots and gauntlets on, and of course the arc plating on his chest, but his eyes are narrowed. “Hey, kid,” he says. “This isn’t suspicious at all. What’s going on?” 

Loki, naturally, enters the room at that moment. 

Peter hadn’t _quite_ gotten around to explaining to Loki that he and Iron Man were close because the whole point of this endeavor was to make Loki feel comfy, and that was _not_ the way to go about that, and he regrets it now. 

The gauntlets of the armor immediately plate over Mr. Stark’s chest and arms, boots traveling up his body. It’s Loki, though, who shoves Peter aside, behind him, like Mr. Stark a threat somehow (maybe he is? Loki sure scarred Mr. Stark for life, maybe Loki saw Iron Man and thought _danger_ ) and lunges before the armor can finish plating.

Loki is fast, so fast, getting into Mr. Stark’s space in a matter of seconds, grabbing one arm and yanking it away from where a blast was building and clamping his other hand around Mr. Stark’s throat, body slamming him into the floor. The neighbors were going to kill him. The nanotech had managed to form enough to protect his neck and the lower part of his jaw, but Peter sees frost cracking and spiderwebbing its way up from where Loki’s suddenly blue hand had touched it. _That’s why he thought I couldn’t touch him,_ Peter thought, then on the heels of that, _a flight or fight response! Neat!_ , then, _oh shit he’s going for the kill—_

“Hey! _Hey!_ Guys, stop, you’re trashing my room!” Peter shouts. His suit was thrown over the back of his desk chair, and when Mr. Stark swept forward it was knocked over by the window where he couldn’t get to it. 

In lieu of his web shooters, he throws a textbook at them. It slams into Mr. Stark’s leg and sends him a step back out of surprise. 

“ _Listen!_ Mr. Stark, he’s fine, I swear. He’s not— there’s nothing _nefarious_ happening—” he starts but a flash of light flies from the repulsors, only to be shot back by some kind of forcefield from Loki. The blast, naturally, leaves a huge scorch mark on one of his walls, but Loki ignores it and rears back, curling up his hands like he’s throwing a ball. 

But this is the second time Mr. Stark’s fought Loki and he’s been obsessing about it for _years_ , reviewing old footage of their fight, grilling Thor about magic, so Peter’s horrified but not surprised when bits of nanotech peel out from the Iron Man armor and shoot over to Loki, encasing his hands and forearms in metal and dragging him down to the floor. 

Mr. Stark raises his repulsors. His pupils are blown out, lit up with the blue light from the arc reactor and the blue lines of vibranium lighting up the hairline fissures of his armor. Peter can see the wormhole above the tower in his eyes, the terror. Loki hisses, trying to yank his arms up but it only works for a few inches before the nanites pull him down again, and he had his neck broken just a while ago, and laid in Peter’s bathtub, and Peter thinks he likes Loki, so—

He doesn’t even think about it when he hurls himself in front of Loki, facing down the twin suns of Mr. Stark’s repulsors. 

Even as a scientist, there’s not a whole lot of laws Peter still believes in. The laws of physics, thermodynamics, and even gravity mean nothing when compared to what the Avengers and the team could do, nothing compared to the other planets and aliens he’s met, nothing compared to the way the universe bent to the Infinity Stones. The only law Peter knows for certain that will never break is that Tony will never, ever hurt him.

The suit powers down so quickly Peter’s eyes can’t process it happening. The suit peels back from Mr. Stark’s skin, metal and electricity ripping back into the plate on Mr. Stark’s chest so quickly it leaves him gasping, stumbling forward from where the suit, hovering in the air, stole away his footing without giving him time to step out. Peter wonders if he even consciously made the decision to turn off the suit, or if the desire not to hurt him has been worked into every one of Mr. Stark’s creations, if FRIDAY, the arc reactor, and the even the bits of vibranium scattered throughout the new Iron Man suit have it built into their molecules to do no harm.

He can feel Loki working through the same thought process behind him, which could be dangerous for him to know but Peter thinks that it’s okay, that Loki would never use him as a human shield. “Kid, don’t do that. C’mon. Gonna give me a heart attack,” Mr. Stark says, his tone still light and friendly despite the look he’s giving Loki over Peter’s head. 

Loki is making that Rottweiler noise behind him. The suit cautiously extends out from Mr. Stark’s chest down one arm, not quite armor, but forming the repulsor blaster on his palm. “Guys, stop,” Peter says, holding out one hand in front of him and trying to push Loki back with the other. 

“Peter, you need to move away from him. Whatever’s been happening here, I’m not into it, but you don’t know what he’s capable of,” Mr. Stark says, letting the armor of his arm and chest slide into place. 

“Please, Stark. You’d turn your blasters on a _child—_ ”

“Hey. Right here. Not a child,” Peter interjects. “Look,” he says, turning to Mr. Stark. “This is all fine! I can explain everything, actually—”

“Oh, excellent,” a voice says from the door. “I’d love to hear the explanation.” 

Peter feels his blood turn to ice and he can see the expression on Mr. Stark’s face turn into something embarrassed and spooked, some kind of excuse on his tongue, and turns to make one of his own.

“Sorry, who are you?” Loki asks Aunt May. 

“Excuse me, buster. What the hell are you doing in my apartment?” Aunt May snaps, dropping her groceries by the door with a crunch, slamming the door, and walking right up to the three of them. 

Peter’s going to die, right here. If Thor appeared now and struck him down with a bolt of lightning he would thank him because whatever was going to happen was not going to be good. 

“Your apartment?” Loki asks. He points to Peter. His nails are still sharp and black. “I thought this belonged to him.” 

“Excuse me?” Aunt May says at the same time Peter says, “What? I’m seventeen!”

“Who _are_ you?” Loki demands again and Peter moves to the middle of the triangle to defend against all sides.

“This is my Aunt May. She, uh, owns the place? And takes care of me? She’s my aunt, so let’s not attack her?” Peter tries, scooting past Aunt May to grab the groceries off the floor in an effort for some brownie points.

“I would never,” Loki says, slightly affronted and relaxing almost immediately.

“Sure. You look really non-threatening right now. What’s up with all of this?” Mr. Stark says, gesturing to Loki’s form, which was a current patchwork of his human skin and Jötunn form, nails, teeth, eyes and raised blue lines atop his light, but not Jötunn, skin.

Loki turns away from Aunt May, who he had been fixing with a charming smile, to change back into snarling at Mr. Stark, upping the ante on the growling. Peter isn’t even sure he was aware of it or knew how to stop it. The _last_ thing Peter needs right now is for Loki to develop a prey drive and go for Mr. Stark’s throat. “Mr. Stark! Can we not! It’s an alien thing.”

“I’m still waiting for an explanation, Peter,” Aunt May says. To her credit, she doesn’t look too afraid or nervous, just huffing with her hands on her hips, chest puffed out and ready to start swinging if something went wrong. Peter loves her. 

“Can we all sit?” Peter says after a moment. “We—couches, let’s go,” he commands when no one says anything. 

Peter thinks he’s getting pretty good at this whole Avenger thing because everyone actually listens to him and sits, Loki on one couch, looking posh and annoyed, Aunt May on the cushioned chair, and Mr. Stark pulls up a stool from the kitchen. 

Peter tells them the whole thing. Mostly. He leaves out chunks of what he’s figured out about Loki’s real form, because Mr. Stark is great and Peter trusts him but the second he starts to mention alien biology his eyes zero in on Loki in a way Peter doesn’t like. It’s a little easy to forget sometimes that Mr. Stark is a bit of a mad scientist. Peter isn’t going to do Loki dirty like that. He tries not to implicate Ned in anything, but knowing Ned he would hate to be left out, so he leaves that stuff in. Ned would _love_ to be taken in my the Avengers for an interrogation. 

Mr. Stark doesn’t speak immediately after he’s done, and Aunt May, seemingly at a loss for words, gets up to wander towards the kitchen. There’s a brief moment where Loki follows her and they both sort of bumble around each other in the kitchen that makes Peter feel warm inside. Loki’s _trying_ to be nice to her, which is all Peter can really ask, and Aunt May isn’t blowing a gasket at Peter bringing Loki into the apartment (at least, not in front of everyone), which is way more than Peter could ask of her. Aunt May makes him get crackers and cut slices of cheese, which he manages to do pretty poorly, to put on the little plate she brings out a moment later with a tea kettle and some cups. Mr. Stark absently takes one, still lost in thought and staring at the chipped paint on the wall behind Peter, and makes a bit of a face when he tastes that it isn’t coffee. Loki perches on the couch, sipping on his drink and nibbling on a cracker, very pointedly attempting to look non-threatening.

“Well, kid. This is not a situation I thought I’d ever find myself in. I kinda thought we had gotten rid of the Loki problem about seven years ago. Seven _years_ , god, I’m getting old,” Mr. Stark finally says, bending over to rub at the bridge of his nose. Loki makes a face where Mr. Stark can’t see him. “So, Frosty, what’s the deal here? You just show up on our planet and expect we’ve all forgotten about the whole thing because Thanos was bigger and badder?”

“It wasn’t like I chose to come to your bedraggled planet. Heimdall tried to direct me through the Bifrost shortly after sending your big green beast here, but his magic was fading and I was dying; it’s a wonder I got here at all aside from a small delay. I had no idea I would end up here, much less after your war had already ended.”

“Hey. No beast talk. We don’t talk shit about Bruce in this household.”

“Language, and it’s my household,” Aunt May says mildly, glancing from Tony to Loki but still not doing anything. Peter anticipated this going a little better, because honestly Mr. Stark is the best but he should know about the _becoming a better person_ thing because he’s been there, but then again, Loki came to Earth and ripped a hole in the universe above his tower, threw him out a window, and then forced him to go through the wormhole where Mr. Stark had seen the things that had haunted him for almost a decade.

“And how do we know you haven’t just been hiding out for six months, huh? I’ve heard all kinds of stories about your tricks, I’m sure you could’ve just been a toad living under a rock while we all got our asses kicked—”

“Well, of course, rely on _Thor’s stories_ to predict what I’ve done even after your child spent the past hour relaying to you that my body was broken and had to be repaired—”

“Not his kid,” Aunt May says.

“Yeah, get with the program. I built his suit and keep an eye on him, don’t get this twisted, but,” he turns to Peter, “parental supervision aside, bringing Loki here was a bad idea, you know that? What were you planning on doing if he went wild? I know you were a kid when this shit happened, but Peter, you have to think sometimes.” He sighs, looking very tired all of a sudden. It’s from a place of concern, Peter knows, but still hurts a little. “And please, you probably could’ve faked your injuries too for all we know, you’ve faked _death_ before, Thor’s said—”

“ _Thor,_ ” Loki spits, rising and hunching forward in one fluid motion, his body bent at the waist and forward towards Mr. Stark, and Peter sees his lips pull back from his teeth, his _sharp Jötunn teeth_ , at the same time Mr. Stark jumps up and raises one hand to blast him into the wall, armor coming back to cover him, and then they’re being shoved apart.

“Both of you, stop it!” Aunt May yells, finally over the whole thing, and then turns more to face Mr. Stark, and shoves him again. “You, particularly!” She shoves him again. “You can’t just come into my house and bring your superhero crap here, ignoring every little thing— Peter’s— done—” She punctuates her final words with more shoves, right up against the Iron Man armor, and if Mr. Stark really wanted to he could hold his ground no problem, but the stunned look on his face and the way he just lets himself stumble shows he’s not even thinking about that right now. “You gave him that suit and dragged him into all of this and now you’re bitching about how he uses it? He’s done something _good_ and you’re in here nitpicking and shouting and waving those blasters like you’re going to blow apart my living room— didn’t even _let me know_ this was happening before blowing stuff up, you could've just _asked_ — shouting at Peter for saving a man’s life when you know half of the new SHIELD would’ve let him die—” She slams her hands against his chest plate and looks ready to keep going until Mr. Stark’s knees hit the back of the couch and he stumbles backwards to fall on the couch. 

She rubs her palms for a few seconds, soothing the sting before whirling on Loki, who until that moment had been looking monstrously smug and now resembles a copy of the alarmed look on Mr. Stark’s face. “And if Peter trusts you, I’ll respect that, but I won’t have you just off the hook either, mister. I had _friends_ in Manhattan,” she spits, and Loki actually rears back, sitting hard on the opposite couch.

The room now looks like Aunt May has three kids instead of one, all chastened and sitting with heads bowed. Peter wants to go over and give her a big hug because damn, he wants to bring her to Avengers meetings and have her shout everyone into compliance when they get into the petty arguing. She’s got this. Peter wonders why he was ever worried about her in the first place.

She huffs for another minute before sitting down and ripping into the cheese. 

Now that everyone seems to have reached an impasse and the Loki problem is out in the open, Peter can get to the real problem here. “When is Thor coming back?” Peter asks, which is what he’s been wanting to ask Mr. Stark since the second he saw him because that was the core of this situation: Peter saved Loki’s life and he was going to get that family reunion, damnit. 

Loki looks over at him, his eyes bright with surprise. “You want to see him, yeah? He thinks you’re dead and it’s messing him up and you miss him and stuff,” Peter tells him. The look on Loki’s face doesn’t change. He had picked up one of Aunt May’s little teacups and it was paused, lifted halfway to his mouth, the entire line of his body rigid. “I don’t see him much but he spends a lot of time skulking around and looking bummed. I think he’d be really happy to see you.”

“I think Thor would be mad at me for being alive,” Loki replies.

“Sure, but I think he’d be really happy too.”

The look Aunt May is giving Peter from the chair is soft and proud, and he can almost feel her squeezing his hand. Loki looks a little like he’s been slapped, blue creeping in around his nail beds, like it was so surprising that Thor would be happy his baby brother was alive. Peter kind of wanted to find whoever was responsible for the divide between the brothers and Loki’s obvious issues and do something terrible to them. Well, _he_ probably wouldn’t do anything so bad, but he could totally sic the Black Widow on them, probably, as a spider-buddies favor. 

Mr. Stark sighs. “He’s in the galaxy. We got the message this afternoon, that’s why I came over in the first place, to let you know. He’s got Nebula with him, I know you wanted to meet her. I’m pretty sure she’s coming back to squeeze more repairs out of me, you know, but you can hang out or whatever,” he mumbles. Peter can tell he doesn’t like Loki, might never will, probably will always see that endless void of space and a closing wormhole whenever he looks at him, but there’s some tension that’s eased around his eyes and his armor has retreated into his chest, hopefully for good. “He’ll be here by tomorrow afternoon, I think.” 

Loki looks flummoxed, but Peter thinks he’ll be alright. He also thinks Loki might flee into the night rather than face Thor within the next twenty-four hours, but he’ll do some damage control on that. 

“I’ll send a car to pick you up tomorrow morning. Both of you. I don’t need reports coming in that you’re roaming the streets of New York, got it? Stay put,” Mr. Stark says, more wearily than his words suggest, and makes for the fire escape to take off. He claps Peter on the shoulder as he passes. “You did good, kid. You always do good,” he says, and keeps walking. After a moment of vanishing into Peter’s room, there’s the sound of him taking off from the fire escape.

Loki stands, brushing crumbs off his pants and mechanically taking the dishes into the kitchen. He just leaves them there, which isn’t so useful, but he still seems a bit stunned so Peter’ll let it slide. “Uh, Loki, you should take a shower and get some new clothes. For tomorrow, you know.” Loki nods, still not looking at him, and wanders into Peter’s room. It’s perhaps a testament that he didn’t take offense to his stress about the whole situation, but Peter doesn’t see what the big deal is. He and Thor will be fine in the end.

It’s Aunt May he’s a little worried about now. She’s in the kitchen, busying herself with putting the dishes in the dishwasher and emptying out the cold tea in the kettle. He shuffles over to her and picks up the towel to dry the fragile teacups she’s washing, and she looks at him, fond but clearly frustrated. “I would get if you’re mad at me, you know? I just wanted— he’s, you know? He was in a dumpster and his neck was broken,” Peter says, gesturing where Loki is undoubtedly listening in from his room. “I wasn’t going to just, close it on him. He would’ve died.” 

There’s a moment where Peter thinks he’s going to be sick, the same feeling seeing the Vulture flying away and knowing he was going to be blown to bits, at the thought of Loki’s body laying dead in a dump. He puts a hand on the counter to steady himself.

Aunt May takes him by the shoulders and shakes her head. “I worry about what he’s done the last time he was in New York. I know you were little and you might not remember very well, but I do. It was awful, Peter, just awful, and I am always worried about you after—” she says and presses her fingers to her mouth, her lips going white. After he died. But she shakes herself a little and takes his face in her hands. “But I am so proud of you,” Aunt May says. “I am never going to be mad at you for doing a good thing.”

Peter is taller than her now, so he has to bend down so she can kiss his hairline, and he finally, finally gives into the urge to hug her, and they stay in the kitchen for a long moment, the faucet still running in the background. 

 

Thor is set to touch down in T-minus five minutes. Loki falls back on the crab cakes. 

Loki looks fully human, having gotten a grip on the mild Jötunn transformations, is dressed in casual Midgardian clothing, and has spent the past ten minutes lurking over by the food table they have set up for Thor’s return. Peter thinks he might’ve created a monster with the new array of Midgardian seafood, but Loki has been radiating anxiety so hard since this morning that Peter’s basically been taking psychic damage so whatever makes him feel better. 

“I appreciate all you have done for me,” Loki says, picking at the crab cake on his little plate. “Yet I don’t see how this is going to work out. With me being here.” He gestures to the small gathering of people waiting for Thor’s ship to land. Mr. Stark is there, shooting Loki some suspicious looks that he breaks off guiltily when Peter returns them with sad ones, along with Maria Hill. Dr. Banner is there also, and he had been cheery when Mr. Stark had broke the news Loki was still kicking, like, suspiciously cheery. Peter thinks that they may have totally been friends before Loki died and Dr. Banner had just been privately carrying that around this whole time and jeez Peter is really glad Ned looked in that dumpster. “Your friends… They adapt quickly. Thor told me they would be fine with me, but I assumed that was thoughtless optimism. I anticipated much more of a sour welcome.” 

Peter wants to shake him a little and say positive things like _you’re likable!_ and _forgiveness is an option!_ , but Loki is going to need a million years worth of therapy to begin to process stuff like that, so he just shrugs. “There’s this crazy immortal mercenary running around the world killing people, but usually only bad people, and we just kinda leave him alone. There’s also this huge black sticky alien gallivanting through San Francisco that eats heads and destroys stuff but he eats a lot of rapists and Miss Potts is into it so Mr. Stark lets it slide. Don’t tell Cap that, though, he gets kind of disappointed in that stuff and his eyebrows get real sad.” 

Loki raises his eyebrows a little. “I doubt I will ever be speaking to the Captain, do not worry.”

“Never say never! He’ll probably give you a lecture about morality or something but he'll warm up to you. I’d bet on it.”

“I admire your faith, but I still don’t understand what your anecdotes have to do with me.” 

“What I’m saying is everyone here might be more forgiving than you think. We get all kinds. Stop beating yourself up, dude. It’s going to be a good day.” It will be. He’s putting that energy into the universe. 

Loki looks highly skeptical, but that’s normal for anything positive that comes out of Peter’s mouth. He opens his mouth to tell Loki that the other Peter’s team is basically just filled with terrible people, but every hair on his body stands on end and he whips his head towards the sky. It takes the rest of the crowd on the lawn another few seconds to realize what’s happening, but he knows what a spaceship feels like the second it enters the atmosphere and Thor is _finally here_. Peter is going to have a meltdown. He’s going to send Ned so many photos, starting with the video he takes of the ship landing, send massive amounts of wind billowing in every direction and scorching the earth as it touches down.

It’s Thor who steps out first in his space armor, Stormbreaker strapped to his back, followed by the little angry raccoon. Nebula is there, _yes, they’re going to be best friends_ , followed by a green woman, and then the rest of the raccoon’s squad and the warrior woman from the news photos. 

Loki goes rigid next to him. There’s a fussy and great moment where Loki poofs the plate away and stands straighter, like he’s totally not freaking out, and Peter inches off to the side to give him some space.

Thor looks like he usually does, which is exhausted but smiling slightly anyway, shaking hands and exchanging greetings with the people who have come to see him in, handing off some cargo for Asgardia before making a beeline for Dr. Banner. They exchange a few words and Peter sees Thor press the palms of his hands into his eyes like he has a headache, but Dr. Banner nudges him. Thor keeps complaining. He nudges Thor again, and when he pauses, points in Loki’s direction.

Peter’s going to record this moment for posterity. He’s got this.

The look on Thor’s face changes. There’s terror first, then disbelief as he takes a few stumbling steps forward. Loki raises a hand in greeting. “I’m here,” Loki says, and finally, Thor’s face breaks into a grin, sun breaking out over the clouds above them and warmth and brightness lighting up his whole face. He looks ten years younger and like the world is no longer rested firmly on his shoulders as he takes another step forward, then another one, and Loki is looking at him, relieved and stunned that Thor looks so happy to see him, alive and well and among friends, and then Thor runs, beaming, arms outstretched.

**Author's Note:**

> come join me on [tumblr](https://valkyrisms.tumblr.com/) if you're still there.


End file.
